Muslim Canadian activist: ‘Burn your burka!’

Muslim Canadian activist: ‘Burn your burka!’

I love it – shades of the Women’s Movement that was just, well, so full of newsworthy events. A former leader of the Muslim Canadian Congress has also spoken out regarding the debate about the burqa/chador/niqab or complete veiling of women’s faces in the Islamic world and elsewhere. Says Tarek Fatah:

The Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) is now adding its voice to Sheikh Tantawi’s, and all the others who demand an end to this insult to the female gender. The MCC, an organization that I once led, has asked Ottawa to introduce legislation that will “ban the wearing of masks, burkas and niqabs in public.”

Defenders of the burka contend that the wearing of a face-mask by Muslim women is protected by our Charter’s right to religious freedom. But such arguments are premised on the myth that a face-mask for women is a necessary part of religiously prescribed Islamic attire.

There is no requirement in Islam for Muslim women to cover their face. Rather, the practice reflects a mode of male control over women. Its association with Islam originates in Saudi Arabia, which seeks to export the practice of veiling — along with other elements of its extremist Wahhabist brand of Islam.

If readers have any doubt about this issue, they should take a look at the holiest place for Muslims — the grand mosque in Mecca. For over 1,400 years, Muslim men and women have prayed in what we believe is the House of God. And for all these centuries, female visitors have been explicitly prohibited from covering their faces.

Three cheers for these courageous Muslims and ex-Muslims who are standing up to the Islamists with their false premises. This fellow Tarek Fatah goes on to say:

The Canada I came to with my wife and daughters should not be a haven for a medieval, misogynist doctrine that traps women under the guise of liberalism and choice.

A very important comment indeed. Let us not allow the phony “liberals” with their shrieks of “Islamophobia” prevent us from standing up for the rights of Tarek Fatah’s family and many others worldwide to live free of this “medieval, misogynist doctrine that traps women…”